William Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within the
company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems which now
appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into the commentary and prefaces
which have been another preoccupation of his later years, are, in many
instances, as vigorous and as subtle as the poems written by him during the
years ordinarily considered to be the period of a poet's maturity. Yeats has
advanced into age with his art strengthened by a long battle which had as its
object a literature written by Irishmen fit to take its place among the noble
literatures of the world. The spectacle of a poet's work invigorated by his
lifelong struggle against the artistic inertia of his nation is one that would
shed strong light into any era.

The phenomenon of a poet who enjoys continued development into the beginning of
old age is in itself rare. Goethe, Sophocles, and, in a lesser degree, Milton
come to mind as men whose last works burned with the gathered fuel of their
lives. More often development, in a poet, comes to a full stop; and it is
frequently a negation of the ideals of his youth, as well as a declination of
his powers, that throws a shadow across his final pages.

Yeats in his middle years began to concern himself with the problem of the poet
in age. He wrote in 1917, when he was fifty-two:&mdash

A poet when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot
keep his mask and his vision, without new bitterness, new disappointment.... Could he if he would, copy Landor who lived loving and hating,
ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, all lost but the favor of
his muses.... Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and
mask I need not suffer any longer. Then he will remember Wordsworth,
withering into eighty years, honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some
waste room, and find, forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust.

We can trace, in Yeats, the continually enriched and undeviating course of an
inspired man, from earliest youth to age. We can trace the rectitude of the
spiritual line in his prose and poetry alike. And there is not a great deal of
difference between the "lank, long-coated figure . . . who came and went as he
pleased," dramatizing himself and his dreams in the streets of Dublin (the
youth who had known William Morris and was to know Dowson and Wilde), and the
man who, full of honors in our day, impresses us with his detachment and subtle
modernity. Yeats, the fiery young Nationalist, rolling up with his own hands,
the red carpet spread on a Dublin sidewalk "by some elderly Nationalist
softened or weakened by time, to welcome Viceroyalty," is recognizable in the
poet of advanced years who does not hesitate to satirize certain leaders of the
new Ireland.

Yeats's faith in the development of his own powers has never failed. He wrote,
in 1923, after receiving from the King of Sweden the medal symbolizing the
Nobel Prize:—

It shows a young man listening to a Muse, who stands young and beautiful with
a great lyre in her hand, and I think as I examine it, "I was good-looking once
like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse
old as it were, and now I am old and rheumatic and nothing to look at, but my
Muse is young." I am even persuaded that she is like those Angels in
Swedenborg's vision, and moves perpetually "towards the dayspring of her
youth."

Irish literary and dramatic movement, in general belief, rose, late in the
nineteenth century, in some vague manner from the temperament of the Irish
people. As a matter of fact, Ireland in Yeats's young manhood was as ungrateful
a soil for art as any that could be found, in a particularly materialistic
time. The native Celtic genius that Arnold had felt to be so open to the
influence of "natural magic" had been, for over a century, drawn off into
politics. The Anglo-Irish tradition, having produced in the eighteenth century
Swift, Congreve, Edgeworth, Goldsmith, Berkeley, and Burke, flowered no more.

The Land Agitation (the struggle of the peasantry against their landlords) and
the Young Ireland and Fenian Movements (the struggle of the Irish people
against English rule) from the '40s on had absorbed the energies and the
eloquence of talented young Irishmen. Irish writers, as Stephen Gwynn has said,
having been taught by Swift that written English could be used as a weapon
against their oppressors, never forgot their lesson. The Catholic Emancipation
Bill, by the efforts of Daniel O'Connell, was passed in 1829. In 1842 the Young
Ireland Movement was given a newspaper by Thomas Davis: the Nation, whose motto
was "to create and foster public opinion in Ireland and make it racy of the
soil." The Nation fostered, as well, a school of Irish poets. Their audience
was eager for stirring and heartening words; the verse which spoke to it most
clearly was the rhetorical and sentimental ballad, celebrating the Irish race
and inciting it to action and solidarity. This verse, when it was not written
in the sentimental and insipid vein made famous by Tom Moore, was filled, as
has been pointed out, with the hortatory gusto of Lord Macaulay. Versifiers
used its forms with skill, and one or two—Clarence Mangan and Sir Samuel
Ferguson—touched them with real color and depth of feeling. But there is no
doubt that Irish literature, in the years between 1848 and 1891, had fallen
upon barren times.

The year 1891 brought Parnell's death. The tragic end of a leader intensely
hated and loved, and the loss of much political hope thereby, threw the
national consciousness violently back on itself. Yeats has described the
situation (he was twenty-six at the time). "Nationalist Ireland was torn with
every kind of passion and prejudice, wanting so far as it wanted any literature
at all, Nationalist propaganda disguised as literature. All the past had been
turned into a melodrama with Ireland the blameless hero, and poet, novelist and
historian had but one object, to hiss the villain, and only the minority
doubted the greater the talent the greater the hiss. It was all the harder to
substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art, because there had been,
however different in their form, villain and victim."

At the breakup of the Catholic State in the wars of the seventeenth century
"Irish laws and customs, the whole framework of the Gaelic civilization, had
been annihilated. Music, literature, and classical learning, loved by even the
poorest of the Irish, had been driven into hiding, with only
'hedge-schoolmasters' and wandering bards to keep them from oblivion." During
the years when the Nation was coming to be the literary force behind Irish
Nationalism, traditional Gaelic survived in the minds of Gaelic-speaking
peasants. Elsewhere it had disappeared, and from these minds and memories it
was rapidly fading. After generations of poverty and oppression, the orally
transmitted songs and histories had become fragmentary. Few educated Irishmen
knew them, since no educated Irishman knew Gaelic. The Irish language was
forbidden in the national schools, and the sons of Anglo-Irish landlords and
rectors who passed through Trinity College in Dublin learned English culture
and English literature. Standish James O'Grady had published his Bardic History
in 1880, but, since O'Grady was a champion of the aristocracy, the book made
little impression on the partisan-minded country as a whole. When, in 1894, an
Irish landlord with literary ambitions, Edward Martyn, said to another of the
same class, George Moore, "I wish I knew enough Irish to write my plays in
Irish," Moore replied, "I thought nobody did anything in Irish but bring turf
from the bog and say prayers." And Yeats has testified in an essay on the Irish
Dramatic Movement: "When we began our work we tried to get a play in Gaelic. We
could not even get a condensed version of the dialogue of Oisin and St.
Patrick."

Where so much of the spirit of art had to be revivified, so many of its forms
repaired, and so tight a mould of fanaticism broken, a man was needed who had
in himself some of the qualities of the fanatic—a man who was, above all else,
an artist, capable of making an occasional compromise with a human being, but
incapable of making one with the informing essence of his art. New light and
air had to be let into the closed minds and imaginations of a people made
suspicious and hysterically provincial through persecution and disaster. It was
impossible to weld the opinions of factions, but all could be drawn into "one
net of feeling." A man of sensibility, however, was not enough. Not only
insight and imagination, but ruthlessness, fervor, disinterestedness, and a
capacity for decision and action, were required.

William Butler Yeats first appears, in the memories of his contemporaries, as a
rarefied human being: a tall, dark-visaged young man who walked the streets of
Dublin and London in a poetic hat, cloak, and flowing tie, intoning verses. The
young man's more solid qualities were not then apparent to the casual observer.
But it was during these early years that Yeats was building himself, step by
step, into a person who could not only cope with reality but bend it to his
will. He tells, in one of his autobiographies, of his determination to overcome
his young diffidence. Realizing that he was "only self-possessed with people he
knew intimately," he would go to a strange house "for a wretched hour for
schooling's sake." And because he wished "to be able to play with hostile
minds" he trained out of himself, in the midst of harsh discussion, the
sensitive tendency "to become silent at rudeness."

The result of this training began to be apparent before Yeats was thirty.
George Moore has recorded how, on meeting him in London (having been badly
impressed by his "excessive" getup at a casual meeting some years before), he
thought to worst Yeats easily in argument. The real metal of his opponent soon
came into view. "Yeats parried a blow on which I had counted, and he did this
so quickly and with so much ease that he threw me on the defensive in a moment.
'A dialectician,' I muttered, 'of the very first order'; one of a different
kind from any I had met before."

This intellectual energy, this "whirling" yet deeply intuitive and ordered
mind, with its balancing streak of common sense, had come to Yeats through a
mixed inheritance. The Yeats blood, perhaps Norman, had been Anglo-Irish for
centuries, and it is notorious that English families transplanted to Ireland
often become more Irish than the native stock. Yeats's paternal grandfather and
great-grandfather had been Protestant rectors, in County Down and County Sligo
respectively, and there had been eighteenth-century soldiers and government
officials on this side of the family. Yeats's mother was a Pollexfen; her stock
was Cornish—that is to say, English-Celtic. Her father, William Pollexfen, a
lonely strong man whom Yeats as a child loved and feared ("I wonder if the
delight in passionate men in my plays and poetry is more than his memory"), had
settled in Sligo as a shipowner, after a career as master of ships. Yeats spent
several of his childhood years and many of his adolescent summers near the town
of Sligo, and from that Western countryside, so full of the beauties of lake,
mountain, and sea, and from its people, who still had Gaelic in their speech
and legends in their memory, he drew the material of his early poetry.

Yeats has told of the deep emotional reserves in his Sligo-born mother, "whose
actions were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons." From his father, John
Butler Yeats, a man of original mind who had been trained in the law but turned
to painting and to the pre-Raphaelite enthusiasms current in the '70s and '80s,
Yeats early heard that "intensity was important above all things." The father's
passion for Blake, Morris, and Rossetti soon was shared by the son. Yeats had
some English schooling; he later was an art student in Dublin. During this
period he became a Nationalist. The elder Yeats had friends among Unionists and
Nationalists alike, and, well acquainted with the liberal English thought of
his time, enthusiastically espoused the cause of Home Rule. His son's
Nationalism was both intellectual and emotional. He became the friend of John
O'Leary, an old Fenian who had returned to Dublin after imprisonment and exile
for youthful conspiracies; and Maude Gonne, a great beauty and successful
agitator, was also an influence helping to channel his youthful ardor toward
the more heroic and mystic side of the Nationalist movement. In both of these
people Yeats felt imaginative and courageous character which transcended
political bigotry and dogma. At no time, from the beginning of his career
onward, did he for a moment yield to the hard letter of Irish politics. It was
the spirit in those politics he wished to strengthen and make serviceable. His
ends, and the means to bring about his ends, were always clear in his mind. "We
cannot move the peasants and the educated classes in Ireland by writing about
politics or about Gaelic, but we may move them by becoming men of letters and
expressing primary truths in ways appropriate to this country."

His art was poetry, and, almost from the first, he used that art as a tool, his
avowed purpose being to rid the literature of his country from the insincere,
provincial, and hampering forms of "the election rhyme and the pamphlet."

The music of Yeats's early poetic efforts was in part derived from Morris and
Shelley. The earliest poems, published in the Dublin University Review in 1886,
paid youth's tribute to romantic subjects and foreign landscape: Spain, India,
Arcadia. The poems in The Wanderings of Oisin, published in 1889, celebrated
Irish landscape as well. Actual Sligo place names appeared in them, and, along
with imaginary words put into mouths of legendary Irish figures, Yeats had
built poems on the single line of a song, or around a few words heard from
peasants. Sligo continued to be the home of his imagination during the next ten
years, when he was much away from Ireland, working as a journalist in London.
His best-known early poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," came to his mind in a
London street, and expressed his homesick memory of an islet in Lough Gill, a
lake near the town of Sligo.

In England he not only was drawn into the end-of-the-century literary movement,
but played an active part in shaping it. With Ernest Rhys he founded, in
London, the Rhymers Club, to which Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and Arthur
Symons belonged. He knew Wilde and was published by W. E. Henley in the
National Observer. Yeats went to Paris in 1894, at a time when Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam's Axel was exerting its power over the young for the first time.
This poem, "the swan song of romanticism," a mixture of Gothic gloom,
Rosicrucian occultism, and Symbolist poetry, was to influence more than one
generation of young writers. "Axel or its theme," Yeats wrote thirty years
later, "filled the minds of my Paris friends. I was in the midst of one of
those artistic movements that have the intensity of religious revivals in Wales
and are such a temptation to the artist in his solitude. I have in front of me
an article which I wrote at that time, and I find sentence after sentence of
revivalist thoughts that leave me a little ashamed." Contact with such
enthusiasm, however, did much to confirm Yeats's own belief in the importance
of standing out for l'art pour l'art. He had been exposed, at exactly the
proper moment in his young career, to literary excitement heightened into a
kind of religious fervor. He brought back seeds of this stimulation to Ireland:
to a soil which had lain fallow for a long time.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, an interest in Gaelic was growing. Douglas Hyde, a
brilliant student at Trinity in Dublin, had learned Gaelic and had begun to
translate Gaelic songs and legendary material into the beautiful Tudor English
still spoken in the West. Gaelic idiom had been brought over into this speech,
and Yeats immediately recognized the language, English yet un-English, in which
he wished to write. His poetry soon took to itself not only Gaelic effects of
alliteration and assonance, but Gaelic effects of rhythm: that "gapped music"
so delicate that it seems to come from the rise and fall of intonation in the
Irish voice.

Many Irish people, particularly the young (as Joyce has testified), were
haunted by the harp-like fluidity of these songs, and imaginatively stirred by
the traditional symbols, the heroic Druid figures Yeats revived. But political
societies and the press turned against his aesthetic purposes. The poems in The
Wind among the Reeds (1899) were termed "affected," "un-Irish,"
"esoteric,"
"pagan," and "heretical." Yeats in later years was to admit a "facile charm, a
too soft simplicity," in his early work. He soon began to clear his style of
its symbolic trappings, to make it austere, flexible, resonant—an instrument
of great lyric and dramatic range. Had he clung to the early style, with its
long swing, almost like incantation, its heavy imagery, he would have limited
himself unduly. Coming when they did, however, these evocations of Celtic
beauty, heroism, and strangeness wakened, as more severe music could not then
waken, Ireland's ears to the sound of its own voice speaking its own music.

Yeats had the good fortune to form, in the late '90s, one of the most important
friendships of his life. He met Lady Gregory when his need for a staying
influence was crucial. He had not entirely escaped the results of the romantic
violence let loose (more into their personal lives than into their poetry) by
the poets of the decade, in their revolt against respectable bourgeois
strictures. He has indicated the nature of his own crisis in Dramatis Personae.
"When I went to Coole [Lady Gregory's estate in Galway] the curtain had fallen
upon the first act of my drama. . . . I must have spent the summer of 1897 at
Coole. I was involved in a miserable love-affair. . . . Romantic doctrine had
reached its extreme development. . . . My nerves had been wrecked."

Lady Gregory, whom Yeats met through Arthur Symons and Edward Martyn (Martyn's
demesne, Tillyra, adjoined Coole), was a woman of much cultivation and
generosity of spirit. Yeats had lost the power to impose upon himself regular
habits of work. Lady Gregory, who was later to write out the Irish legends in
the simple speech of the peasants of her countryside, took him from cottage to
cottage collecting folklore. Coole and its environs were to give the mature
Yeats a background for his later work, as Sligo had given him a scene for his
earlier. With his technical apprenticeship and his most excessive enthusiasms
behind him, Yeats turned away from the middle-class culture of Dublin to the
people of Galway farms and villages, "Folk is our refuge from vulgarity." Once
he had regained "a tolerable industry," his grasp on reality was further
strengthened by the struggle to found what was to become the Abbey Theatre. To
this task he and Lady Gregory, with the help of Edward Martyn and George Moore,
now applied themselves.

Yeats knew that nothing was read in Ireland but "prayer books, newspapers, and
popular novels." He also knew that the Irish had been trained, by politics and
the Church, to listen. They were a potential audience, in the primary sense of
that word. He had already formed in Dublin the National Literary Society, with
the intention of giving "opportunity to a new generation of critics and writers
to denounce the propagandist verse and prose that had gone by the name of Irish
literature." He now wanted a literary theater. He had written plays, but had no
stage, unless it were the stage of small halls, where they could be
presented.

Against him were ranged the entrenched powers of the commercial theatre, the
Church, and the press, the last two informed with the special Irish fear of
"humiliation" and misinterpretation, bred from Ireland's peculiar political
situation. "But fight that rancor I must." He fought it for more than ten
years, not only for the sake of his own plays, but for the plays of other Irish
dramatists, particularly Synge. His own plays caused mild trouble. Synge's
Playboy, presented in 1904, brought on a week of riots and emptied the Abbey
Theatre for months. But Yeats held out, against an enraged Dublin and an
intimidated company. By 1912 the public had learned how to listen to
imaginative drama with appreciation, to satiric plays without resentment. The
Irish Dramatic Movement had come through, at the cost of great energy and
courage expended by its founders. Yeats then turned away from the "popular"
theatre, and began to write plays which could be presented in a room by a few
amateurs and musicians, plays which could carry his special music and dramatic
formality with the least theatrical machinery.

"We should write out our thoughts," Yeats has said, "in as nearly as possible
the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate
friend."
And again: "If I can be sincere and make my language natural, and without
becoming discursive, like a novelist, and so indiscreet and prosaic, I shall,
if good or bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet; for it will no
longer be a question of literature at all."

If we grant naturalness, sincerity, and vigor to Yeats's late style, we still
have not approached its secret. Technical simplicity may produce, instead of
effects of tension and power, effects of bleakness and poorness. What impresses
us most strongly in Yeats's late work is that here a whole personality is
involved. A complex temperament (capable of anger and harshness, us well as of
tenderness), and a powerful intellect, come through; and every part of the
nature is released, developed, and rounded in the later books. The early Yeats
was, in many ways, a youth of his time: a romantic exile seeking, away from
reality, the landscape of his dreams. By degrees—for the development took
place over a long period of years—this partial personality was absorbed into a
man whose power to act in the real world and endure the results of action
(responsibility the romantic hesitates to assume) was immense. Yeats advanced
into the world he once shunned, but in dealing with it he did not yield to its
standards. That difficult balance, almost impossible to strike, between the
artist's austerity and "the reveries of the common heart,"—between the proud
passions, the proud intellect, and consuming action,—Yeats finally attained
and held to. It is this balance which gives the poems written from (roughly)
1914 on (from Responsibilities, published in that year, to poems published at
present) their noble resonance. "I have had to learn how hard is that
purification from insincerity, vanity, malignance, arrogance, which is the
discovery of style."

Technically, the later style is almost lacking in adverbs—built on the noun,
verb, and adjective. Its structure is kept clear and level, so that emotionally
weighted words, when they appear, stand out with poignant emphasis. The Wild
Swans at Coole (1919) opens:—

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

Equipped with this instrument, Yeats could put down, with full scorn, his
irritation with the middle-class ideals he had hated from youth:—

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this that Edward Fitzgerald died
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

On the other hand he could celebrate Irish salus, virtus, as in the poem "An
Irish Airman Foresees His Death," and in the fine elegies on the leaders of the
1916 Easter Rebellion.

And Yeats came to be expert at the dramatic presentation of thoughts concerning
love, death, the transience and hidden meaning of all things, not only in the
form of a philosopher's speculation, a mystic's speech, or a scholar's lonely
brooding, but also (and this has come to be a major Yeatsian effect) in the
cracked and rowdy measures of a fool's, an old man's, an old woman's song. The
Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1929) contain long meditations—
some "in
time of civil war"—upon his life, his times, his ancestors, his descendants;
upon the friends and enemies of his youth.

The short plays, composed on the pattern of the Japanese No drama, which Ezra
Pound had brought to Yeats's attention,—Four Plays for Dancers (1921), Wheels
and Butterflies (1934), The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935),—Yeats made
the vehicle for the loveliest of his later songs, for all his later development
of pure music:—

Come to me, human faces,
Familiar memories; I have found hateful eyes
Among the desolate places,
Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes.

Folly alone I cherish
I choose it for my share,
Being but a mouthful of air I am content to perish.
I am but a mouthful of sweet air.

The opening song in the play Fighting the Waves illustrates the
variety of stress, the subtlety of meaning, of which Yeats became a
master:—

A woman's beauty is like a white
Frail bird, like a sea-bird alone
At day-break after a stormy night
Between two furrows of the ploughed land;
A sudden storm and it was thrown
Between dark furrows of the ploughed land.
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle and mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?

A strange unserviceable thing,
A fragile, exquisite pale shell,
That the vast troubled waters bring
To the loud sands before day has broken.
The storm arose and suddenly fell
Amid the dark before day has broken.
What death? what discipline?
What bonds no man could unbind,
Being imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind,
What pursuing or fleeing
What wounds, what bloody press
Dragged into being
This loveliness?

From youth on, Yeats has thought to build a religion for
himself. Early "bored
with an Irish Protestant point of view that suggested, by its blank
abstraction, chlorate of lime," he eagerly welcomed any teaching which attested
supersensual experience, or gave him a background for those thoughts which came
to him "from beyond the mind." "Yeats likes parlor magic," George Moore
maliciously remarked, in the '90s. At that time, when religious belief and
man's awe before natural mysteries were rapidly breaking up, the wreckage of
the supernatural had been swept into mediums' shabby parlors and into the hands
of quacks of all kinds. Many men of Yeats's generation took refuge in the
Catholic Church. But Yeats kept to his own researches. He had experimented,
when an adolescent, with telepathy and clairvoyance, in the company of his
uncle, George Pollexfen, a student of the occult. He later studied the
Christian Cabala and gradually built up, from his own findings and from the
works of Blake, Swedenborg, and Boehme, his theories of visionary and spiritual
truth. But he was never, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, a gullible pupil. He
invariably tried to verify phenomena. And to-day, when we know more than we
once knew concerning the meaning of man-made symbols, the needs of the psyche,
and the workings of the subconscious, Yeats's theories sound remarkably
instructed and modernly relevant. His Anima Mundi closely resembles Jung's
universal or racial unconscious, and even his conceptions of Image and
Anti-Image, the Mask and its opposite, are closely related to psychological
truth.

Of late years, after a lifetime spent at efforts to break up the deadening
surface of middle-class complacency, Yeats has drawn nourishment from the
thought of the relation of eighteenth-century Anglo Irish writers to their
society. These men—Swift, Berkeley, Grattan—had behind them, he believes, a
social structure capable of being an aid to works of imagination and intellect.
The ideal of the artist built into his background, sustaining it and sustained
by it, Yeats has termed "Unity of Being." He has striven all his life to give
Ireland a sense of what such a society can be, and to make himself an artist
worthy of the energy which built "the beautiful humane cities."

In age, he shows no impoverishment of spirit or weakening of intention. He
answers current dogmatists with words edged with the same contempt for "the
rigid world" of materialism that he used in youth. He is now content to throw
out suggestions that are not, perhaps, for our age to complete, as it is not
for our age fully to appreciate a man who reiterates: "If we have not the
desire of artistic perfection for an art, the deluge of incoherence, vulgarity,
and triviality will pass over our heads." But adherence to that creed, and that
creed alone, has given us the greatest poet writing in English to-day, and
Ireland the greatest it has ever known.

Move upon Newton's town,
The town of Hobbes and of Locke,
Pine, spruce, come down
Cliff, ravine, rock:
What can disturb the corn?
What makes it shudder and bend?
The rose brings her thorn,
The Absolute walks behind.

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Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.